Economic Migrants Vs Refugees

We tend to have more sympathy for refugees, as they have usually suffered to some degree and have not chosen the lot which brings them away from their home. If we are going to rescue anyone, we think, better to rescue the innocent sufferers.  This is part of why liberals (generally) commenting on the situation in Europe want us to think that pretty much all these people are refugees, showing us pictures of cute children or sad-looking parents carrying their few belongings.

Conservatives (generally) are quick to focus on how few of them seem to actually fit the description, noting the preponderance of young males, the cost of smuggling them across Turkey, their unwillingness to go to the poorer European or any Arab country, and opinion polls suggesting that as many as 30% may have sympathy for terrorist groups including ISIS and be uninterested in assimilating to their new countries very much.  Refugees good, migrants bad, in the news cycle.

There's another side to that. Refugees tend to arrive with fewer skills, and are often passive.  Whether this is a passivity attributable to their trauma, or whether passive people are more likely to become refugees in battle zones I don't know, but the final effect is passivity here.

Cuban refugees went to my school when I was a boy, and about a third of the foreign students in my highschool were refugees from one place or another.  We resettled Laotians in the early 80's. The occasional Polish or Russian refugee would come into our field of vision before the Iron Curtain fell. Refugees from former Yugoslavia work at my hospital, and I know that crowd moderately well.  We worked with Sudanese refugees more recently, teaching Sunday School and helping them found a church in our denomination.  We still see those a bit.

And through it all I have had many refugees, from a couple of dozen places, among my patients at the hospital. I may know more refugees than I know other immigrants, which would surely seem strange to those who live in Mexamerica or near the big cities. 

I'm no expert on refugees and my sample is biased in more than one direction, but I do know some, in various places and times. I know some who have good American jobs and middle-class lives now, and I know some who we will be caring for forever, because they have no ability to do even the simplest job here. Nor do all of them have any kind of grateful attitude or the gentle tolerance of people who have seen much pain, as movies and documentaries would have us think.  Some do. The small numbers that we take in are largely symbolic in terms of solving the problems of the world.  A gesture. They can be a significant burden on an area.

Most of our ancestors were economic migrants, not refugees. Even those that were escaping political or religious persecution were not actually refugees, though we certainly have had both.  Most of the immigrants now are not refugees, but people hoping to set up some sort of life here. 

I'm not advocating anything.  Just clarifying.

Who Can Govern Now?

I clicked on an article that said that Trump is Clinton's worst nightmare as an opponent.  I haven't the faintest idea if this is true, and I'm betting even the professionals don't have a clear eye on this either.

Yet it did put me in mind of a derivative set of questions. What if Trump can't win, but his accurate attacks on her make her unable to govern even her own party if elected? She could win by default in an ugly match and be a lame duck on the day she takes office.  Similarly, if Trump is elected, does he have the least control over his own party, let alone the country?

Stay out of the questions of whether Obama can or could, whether Romney could have, or all the other subsidiary questions.

Run that further down the list. If Hillary is arrested and/or falters, can Sanders or O'Malley get enough delegates to be nominated?  And even if they do, can they be presidents who can sway even their own friends, let alone the opposed or undecided?  Opposing-faction Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush cannot unite a bitterly divided GOP, though people might vote them in while pounding their heads.  Who among the Republicans or Democrats has the stature to bring in the recalcitrant by virtue of strong personality, or has allies strong enough to herd the sheep?

None, I think.  Hillary may have some force of punishment, and she has a talent for it, but that's nowhere near enough to run a country.  I am bad at predictions.  Yet I think we may be looking at the experiment of what happens in Congress when the President has no control.

Morally Righteous

Related to the previous comment about language and culture.  Occupy Democrats is calling Obama's executive order "morally righteous" today (comparing it to Eisenhower's desegregation order).  Not so very long ago, the more-extreme liberal would snigger at anything claiming to be righteous, as that sort of moral certainty is impossible. From late in my college career until about a decade ago, that would have been the case (though the belief in their moral certainty remained intact.  One just didn't say so.) "Righteous" was a word of mockery. "Moral" was sometimes admitted, but could also have an eye-roll attached to it.

Words change.

Races

It is a commonplace to say that the British are a people of mixed blood. I hope...to indicate a little how, when, and why this mingling of races occurred.

This is how language changes and cultural changes occur. The quote is from 1926, by the eminent British historian G.M.Trevelyan, and the "races" and mixed blood he refers to are Celts (Gaels, Picts), Britons, Scandinavians, the triad of Angles/Jutes/Saxons, the Normans, plus a smattering of Others. Indeed, for the nine centuries 166 to 1066 those are the races of Briton, and for the nine centuries 1066 to 1966, no one else entered.  Some Frisians and Huguenots, or the occasional interesting colonial. Though even of the latter, most were returning Britons or Saxons, not natives of other parts of the world.

Words change culture and culture changes words.

Haidt's Righteous Mind Again

Jonathan Haidt mostly gets it about liberals and conservatives.  He comments on libertarians as well, and what he reports seems about right, but I don't feel positioned to be quite as definite about that.

Brief Review.  You can read in detail for yourself at his Moral Foundations site.   I do not recommend his TED talk from 2008, as it predates his important revisions and will muddy the waters. You can also skim what I have written over the years. 

Liberals operate from three unequal but solid strands in their morality: Care vs. Harm is strongest; Liberty vs Oppression (an axis that was not in his original matrix); Fairness vs. Cheating is third.

Conservatives add three others into their determination of whether something is moral or not, and Haidt claims all six are about equal in strength: Loyalty vs. Betrayal; Authority vs. Subversion; Sanctity versus Degradation.

Libertarians have one massive axis and one minor one. Liberty vs Oppression dominates the field, with Fairness vs Cheating chiming in.

I claimed right from the start when I first mentioned him in 2008 that liberals do, in fact, use the remaining three categories, it just wasn't picked up in his questioning.  The authorities mentioned were conservative ones , the "disgusts/sacrals" left out GMO foods, hunting (and here), environmental problems of low practical but high aesthetic concern, a good percentage of vegetarianism, iconic liberals . Plus my favorite, about the healing power of John Lennon's piano.  Because clearly, those must be conservatives driving that one.

Black conservatives can tell you about the loyalty/betrayal axis.

Haidt does acknowledge in passing that liberals do actually respond in these ways, and even uses a couple of the examples (Gandhi, MLK, and as above) I have been hammering all these years. (I'm taking full credit for all of that.) Yet in the end he discounts that they are much of a factor.  I continue to say he's just wrong in this.  However, I think it is a fair point that Conservatives do respond to these more as well as differently, so his central point remains important.

He remains a partisan Democrat/Liberal and is quite up front about it.  He devotes occasional sections to advising Democrats what they should do to win elections. (Mostly, they seem not to do this. A great many remain so incensed at what they view as a betrayal that they cannot hear him. Not only the comments sections, but discussions from other academics excoriate him - a social psychologist -for not recognising that conservatives are simply morally inadequate, stupid, and evil. Which I think is evidence for my point that Loyalty/Betrayal is active for liberals.) Recently an academic paper and an essay of his have been circulating about ideological intolerance by liberals starting well before college, citing talks he has been giving at private high schools. He doesn't think academia leaning left is a problem.  He does think that academia being entirely leftist is a huge problem. He thinks intellectual diversity promotes better thinking and research.

Yet when he summarises the liberal and conservative narratives late in The Righteous Mind  he is nearly fair. There is a whiff of dismissal of conservative thought (the defense of what is good) which he is unaware of, but not too terrible. I am more concerned about his summary of liberal narrative (the progression of rights).  It seemed spot on at first, but he seems to forget his own main point about the rider and the elephant: he attributes their moral view to the rider.  Throughout the book he teaches, and gives good illustrations, that everyone is 90% elephant and 10% rider. At heart, I think he believes the rider percentage is higher for liberals.

I mostly breezed by that "religion is important for internal bonding and enhances group selection" part of the book in an earlier post.  Haidt spends a fair bit of time on it in the book.  He is an atheist that now hangs out with UU's I recall, for exactly that reason.  Do we need to discuss that further?  I don't have much to add, but it might be a fun discussion.  Maybe an open thread in a day or two.  Though I don't know if this audience likes to do that.

RINO

Donna B (I think) mentioned this in a December comment section, and I have pondered it and adopted it.  What conservatives call a RINO (and presumably, what progressives call a DINO) may be more a reference to a willingness to compromise than to actual policy positions.  Romney's position on immigration, Rubio's position on corporate welfare, Sanders's position on mortgage regulations, are less important to their supporters than the sense that he will/won't cave.  That very much ties in to an entire sense of tribal defense, or attack on the correct enemies, than on getting it right.

This changes everything, slightly.

I have wondered if time-travel with perfect knowledge could create a senator who could be elected indefinitely; because after the first two election failures with perfect predictions of what would be most important going forward, the third election would succeed and the fortress would be impregnable.  I have decided this would not be so*, not merely from cynicism of the crowd wanting bread and circuses, but because the role of tribal representative is valuable not only for decorative, but for cultural purposes.  People live their tribal lives now.  They want to protect their posterity and have some sense of what will do that, but they are not wired to respond to much beyond My Tribe, Now.

Update:  Donna says it was T99.

*Because John Sununu basically did that and then lost to a social studies teacher who votes the Party Line reliably.

Facebook/Blog Seal Broken

I put this up on FB today.  As my extended family and all my coworkers are liberal, I should expect some pushback.  Ah well.

Imagine a preventive medicine or treatment that sounds very plausible, but has been shown to be ineffective: a medicine, a screening, a supplement. Convinced that there must be something to it nonetheless, bright people try other procedures based on the same theory, but these also come up empty. Repeatedly empty, in different populations and circumstances. Suggestive anecdotes keep popping up, but when researchers try to pin this down, the variance is all easily explainable by other factors.

That's usually called an "alternative medicine," which sounds great to some people and horrible to others. It's related to believing in vague "toxins," which are sometimes real but are more usually imaginary.

Next, consider that there are side effects to this array of treatments (as there always are). Not so horrendous as the critics predicted, but real and persistent. Let us add that the side effects are inconveniently worse for a minority (or discriminated-against) population. Pick one, it doesn't matter. Worse for African-Americans, worse for women, worse for LGBTQ, whatever. Though ironically, this group is among the most persistent advocates of the useless vaccine or vitamin. Ah well, human nature.

Except the major side effect in this case is "death."

Now, pull back the curtain and reveal that all of this is also expensive. Not budget-breaking, impoverishing expensive, but wasteful of time, money, social capital, and goodwill.

Like what you see? Of course you do. That is, if you are in the population that still believes that this alternative medicine actually should work, if it were only tried thoroughly, instead of halfheartedly.

That's what you are sharing on the internet today, how great it is that President Obama has finally, finally put in place laws that will kill more black people - okay, not a lot more black people, but some. As it will have disparate impact in black and (some) Hispanic communities it will also increase incarceration,mistrust, and tension for them. But that's okay, because you can blame that on other people. And you got to kick your main electoral competitors in the balls, making fun of how evilly GUNZ they are.

More black grandmas go to funerals. Try to attend a few, okay?

Oregon

I don't know much, but I'm liking that it's all providing evidence for my observed pattern.  Conservatives take a defensive response, holing up and saying "come and get me, you bastards."  Liberals (OWS, Wisconsin state house, Eric Holder at Columbia) like to get in your face occupying a very public space when they protest. There is personality difference, not mere policy disagreement, at work here.

What Would Jaroslav Do?

A long rant, which I have held out for two weeks and is already undermined by my posts on Jonathan Haidt.  But here it is anyway.

How is it that those who proclaim the loudest that context influenced scripture and the subsequent interpretation of Jesus by Christians seem the least able to step out of their own current culture and see how context influences them?  Fundamentalists and literalists might have some excuse for insisting that the Bible has one, generally understandable interpretation (usually an Anabaptist, 17^th- 19^th C salvation message), which does not change. Their timescale of church history tends to stop at Patmos and pick up again at Luther. Yes, I am being a bit unfair.

Yet it’s the others that concern me at present.  In our Advent liturgy we had the following passage from Revelation 19, and it brought me up short:

11 I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and wages war. 12 His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. 13 He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. 14 The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. 15 Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.”[a] He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. 16 On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written:  KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS  17 And I saw an angel standing in the sun, who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, “Come, gather together for the great supper of God, 18 so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and the mighty, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small.” 19 Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to wage war against the rider on the horse and his army. 20 But the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who had performed the signs on its behalf. With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped its image. The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur. 21 The rest were killed with the sword coming out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh.

When this vision first came into the hands of the church, there was debate off and on for the next three centuries whether it was scripture.  But what doesn’t seem to have been debated was whether this is a possible Jesus.  I know, I know, it’s apocalyptic literature, it concerns the Second Coming, it’s all very symbolic and hard to understand, and everyone seems to get a lot of final chances before this Jesus goes into action.  Yet I still would claim that most people today, not only outside the church but in it, would not regard this as a possible Jesus. And I would most emphatically include clergy in that.  Whatever they might say by way of rationalization that they do too include that Jesus, there isn’t any evidence of that in all their other references to him when they are commenting on social or political Jesus. I believe that people eventually say what they really mean, and their Jesus has a lot of 60’s liberal in him.

I had church professionals putting "Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men"  up on FB in the entirely secular "Gee, Jesus really hates war, don't you get it?" context this year.  Jesus came so that Jews, Greeks, Samaritans and Romans could all have access to the Kingdom of God.  Whether the Jews and Romans who didn't follow him got along politically doesn't seem to have mattered to Him all that much.*

Tangent on conservative Christians: They may do a bit worse on this, as their tendency is to reference defending Christian culture, not mentioning any favorite Jesus quite so much in this context. However much they mention Christ in other discussions, it’s Christians in the political ones. End tangent.

*You can derive a "peace among the nations" doctrine at some distance from an understanding that secular events aren't that important in the overall scheme, plus the worry that there might be Christians on the other side of a war.  But it's derivative.  It's not in the NT, certainly not in the gospels.

***********

Jaroslav Pelikan, highly esteemed professor of theology at Yale, wrote Jesus Through The Centuries (among many other works).  I fought my way through some of it, but I found his style difficult.  Nonetheless, the overarching ideas are important: Christians in different eras have seen different things in Jesus and have emphasized different interpretations. They are not necessarily contradictory, nor are they beyond each other’s understanding.  The culture influences how people see Jesus, which in turn influences the culture. One of Pelikan’s chapters is “The Rabbi.”  I have certainly read and heard people expound on this idea.  “The Turning Point of History,” is another way the church once looked at Jesus, and I have heard that too.  “The Teacher of Common Sense” is more 18^thC rationalist.  It is no longer so much taught, but it has several descendants in the present era. Golden Rule Christians, for example. Health and Wealth gospel is looked at as magical, but its social interaction equivalent is looked on as just Common Sense.  If we spread peace and treat others with kindness, it will win them to Christ, and in foreign policy, we won’t have wars.  Yes, I am being a bit unfair.  But it goes back at least as far as JB Phillip’s Your God Is Too Small, and its “Jesus Meek and Mild.” This Jesus seems to have taken over whole sectors of the church.  Perhaps to counter other Jesuses.

My friends who have read Pelikan, or who have even heard of him other than from me, should thus be most alert to the possibility that the cultural and political events from their 16^th to 20^th birthdays, and the views and values of their secular peer group, may have an inordinate influence on their view of Jesus.  Because they know that such things happen.  Because they know that this is human nature, and where our theology will naturally fall unless we take active steps to counteract that.

Jesus speaking to the woman at the well (and there’s a 60’s folk song about that!) is a trifecta of marginalization: Samaritan, woman, and sexual sin, so it is of course prominent, because Jesus was especially focused on the marginalized is a modern doctrine.  Favorite Jesus.  The parable of the sheep and the goats is big, because people are quite sure it includes advocating for government programs. There are a few other faves.  And they are true, certainly. We can’t have a gospel that leaves them out. But they fit so nicely with what people want to be true for other reasons that they should be suspicious. When we come to secretly believe that Jesus came so that Greeks, Romans, and Jews could get along we should be more than suspicious.  

We could make a counter-list of Jesus driving out the moneylenders, or giving permission to carry a sword, and telling stories of people in torment and leaving the dead to bury the dead.  But that would just be the same problem in a mirror, seeking justifications for some other favorite Jesus.

More On Free Riders

I just can't get to the main topic, can I?  Well, I suppose the elephant and rider is the main topic.  Broke that rule last night, yelling at a rider on FB. It never works, but some people deserve it when they are disguising how insulting they are being, even to themselves.

Additional thoughts on free riders: in an interdependent world, we are all free riders some time or other. In terms of giving and receiving from the government, there is the mortgage interest deduction, and even those who paid in to Social Security will be receiving from others someday. If there weren't a lot of societal surplus out there, we couldn't afford to send lots of young people to college, even without all the government subsides of it. Yet it turns out to be an investment that benefits us all in some cases, so we fund that temporarily. (Less true every year, I think.) That may be part of the extra ire students draw from conservatives.  However much they may be valuable to us all in the future, right this minute they are free riders, yet they don't seem to apprehend that.

Corporate welfare, or being employed by governments or nonprofits can sometimes be free riding, though it is tough to nail down exactly who is shirking and who is providing benefit to society. I have spoken to liberals who just believe in their heart of hearts that "just moving money around" is not respectable employment and drains value from the common pool, however much you try to explain to them that we would all still be in the Dark Ages without it. Managing a hedge fund is just evil.  They know that. I have spoken to conservatives who consider nonprofit advocacy groups to be drains on society, and most if not all government employees likewise. No amount of reasoning dents them.  They know better. The natural extension of that would be to consider everyone who isn't creating food, clothing, or shelter to be a free rider.  Tough world to live in.

We have all received things we have not worked for or deserved, but tend to forget those. It's human nature.  Even people who are clear free riders will denounce other free riders they believe are worse.  If you want to locate benefit cheats, in fact, the best people to ask are other benefit receivers. They know them, they see them, they know what the rules are and who is breaking them. All of us, it seems, look mostly in one direction when considering free riders.

Which brings me to the free riders that we know best: family.  We all know a fair number - the sister who always borrows money from Mom and Dad, the nephew who sponges off your brother, the aunt who successfully cheated other family out of various bits of valuable inheritance.  We judge harshly because we know, or think we know, what they really should be capable of and how they don't care.

On The Way To Other Exhibits

We'll be going to the Currier Museum to see the Maxfield Parrish exhibit tomorrow, and will be taking the older granddaughter.  She has thought this sculpture in the Contemporary Art section to be funny in the past.  A "funny family," as an 8-year-old doesn't get that Marisol's work is a scathing indictment of the traditional family. 

Marisol Escobar’s The Family takes a satirical look at the American family of the 1960s. In this multi-figure, free-standing sculpture, a stylish mother smiles mindlessly with a pillbox hat pulled snugly over her eyes, literally blinded by her fashion accessory and distracted from attending to the four children that surround - and confine - her. The male head of this family stands adjacent to his wife and is the only figure attached to the wall, encased in a tomb-like wooden panel and physically isolated from his wife and children. The effect suggests the trappings of this man’s and woman’s place in society and creates a schism in the idealized family popularized in such mid-century media as the television show Leave it to Beaver. Marisol expands upon her witty take on the American family by putting child-sized adults in the baby carriage. The Family shows Marisol at her best, using humor to interrogate the reality behind the American Dream. In 1970 Time magazine featured The Family on its cover to illustrate "The U.S. Family: Help!", an article that lamented the demise of traditional family structures and shifting gender roles in contemporary America. Marisol’s focus on the complexities of post-WWII American society aligned with the interests of Pop artists, who incorporated imagery from popular culture and mined the new, postwar social, economic, and cultural landscape. While Marisol was in dialogue with a Pop aesthetic, and even starred in Andy Warhol’s film Kiss in 1963, she drew on a variety of artistic sources for inspiration, including Cubism and pre-Columbian and South American folk art. Marisol integrated these diverse influences and crafted her own distinct artistic language. Sculptor George Segal, Marisol’s contemporary, commented that "Marisol’s art has always had wit, but she’s dead serious. She brings a complexity to her work, which has a sobering gravity. She’s an original." Marisol’s original creations often feature self-portraits. In The Family, the centrally positioned daughter in a red dress carries a doll with Marisol’s face drawn on it. Other examples include The Wedding (1962), in which one Marisol marries another Marisol, and Dinner Date (1962), where one Marisol eats dinner with another Marisol. In The Party (1966), thirteen life-sized figures all have Marisol’s countenance. Marisol explained this repeated use of her self-portrait: "I did a lot of self-portraits then [1960s] because it was a time of searching for one’s identity. I looked at my faces, all different in wood, and asked, Who am I?"

Well, perhaps it was fresh and new in 1963, but I'm rather tired of that attitude by now.  Tell me, are there museum pieces that make fun of non-traditional families? One of those would start riots, I'll bet.

Ma (He's Makin' Eyes At Me)

Out of Order Again

I don't seem to be getting around to general comments on Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, getting rabbit-trailed into interesting side topics instead.  Perhaps that is best.  Many of you are somewhat familiar with Haidt anyway. If I leap right into the main topics some important and interesting items might get missed.

He notes in two separate sections that conservatives are much more focused on the issue of free riders. First, he acknowledges, somewhat surprised, that conservatives are more generous to others, but notes that they like to keep control over who benefits from their generosity.  They are very quick to help those who are clearly innocent victims, or those who are perceived as having been on the short end of luck, such as bystanders or those in extreme weather conditions. But as the causes of the misfortune become more ambiguous, conservatives back off.  In the cases of folks who have caused much of their own misery, conservatives are not only uncaring, but often hostile.  Liberals, he finds, tend to make these distinctions far less often.  Suffering in itself calls out for compassion, and more subtly, we seldom can see cause and desert as clearly as we think we do.

Second, he follows the origin-of-religions idea of those who still hold out the possibility that natural selection can operate at a group level. (Note: though attractive, this has pretty much been eliminated in discussing non-humans, and many popular explanations of group selection occurring among humans have been whittled down to individual selection. It is considered risible by many.  Haidt makes a fair case for it occurring in a few limited areas.) It's an Emil Durkheim-descended idea, with Nicholas Wade probably the most widely-read of the current advocates for the position. The connection is that religions, which require sacrifice and increase group bonding with the same actions, offer some selection advantage by reducing the free-rider problem. I have a few objections to this sort of reductionist view, but let that pass for the moment.  Community is certainly a Jewish and then Christian theme in the Bible, and it is central to my own theology of both OT and NT. *

Contemplating that the free rider problem is an enormous issue to conservatives, I realised that it is an enormous issue to me personally as well.  It may explain nearly entirely my siding with conservatives generally despite my objections to them on many fronts. To not be a free rider is as powerful and animating force for me as I can identify. My children were clubbed by it, sometimes in word, always by example.  One does his bit, however distasteful, and there's an end to it.

I make distinctions that many conservatives, or at least the noisier ones, do not, revolving around my fury at their declaring some to be free riders who have had little or no control over their situations.  It might be technically true that people with Down's Syndrome are free riders, but I don't respond to the helpless that way emotionally, and I certainly can't find Christian justification for it.  You may quote "The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat" as much as you please, but Jesus didn't seem to address beggars in that way, nor did Peter and Paul. Yet you can find Christians who draw the circle very widely of who is a free rider and who is not. I find it infuriating.

Yet at some level, I get it.  I apply a very high standard to myself on such matters (or did until a few years ago; there are lacunae in the fabric now). I have little sympathy for those who ride free off others - and I have known some quite well.  One consequence is that I no longer regard their opinion on any moral issue as having the least weight. If hatred for free riders turns out to be heritable, and a common cause of conservatism, I would put down money that I have plenty of genes that could play out that way.

So, allowing for the usual caveats that this is not an either-or situation, but group tendencies, this is a place where conservative riders who are arguing with liberal elephants would do well to remember that they do not feel quite as strongly as you do about free riders; and liberal riders to keep in mind that conservative elephants care about this a great deal.  It will increase understanding.

* I note again.  Jesus seems focused on building a new tribe that includes both Jews and Greeks.  Whether Jews and Greeks in general, outside of His kingdom, get along better does not seem important to Him.

Persuasion

Regarding Jonathan Haidt's characterisation of our moral understanding as 90% intuitive and 10% rational - the Elephant and Rider - his advice to liberal Democrats (who he supports and wishes would use less strident, more winsome arguments) is that the "speak to the elephant, not the rider."

I resist this, because I feel that we should all be persuaded by the rational, not sub-rational arguments.  I should, you should, they should. To do anything else seems to be cheating, however effective it might be.  I would rather offend by driving all my nails to the center of the earth and being aggressive than to stoop to mere emotional manipulation.  In particular, pretending that an emotional manipulation is really a logical argument infuriates me.

Haidt's view is that arguments from reason should be reserved for friends and allies. Opponents cannot understand them, nor can we understand theirs.  He grants some exceptions to this, and is far kinder to conservatives than to liberals on that score.  But generally, we should talk to the elephant.

**********

People who want to track this down will be interested in Antonio Damsio's research on patients who had damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex area of the brain.  Their emotionality was severed from their moral decision making, so that they were something like the entirely rational beings beloved by all the aspie sci-fi authors and their readers:  Spocks or Mentats.  Their moral reasoning was not superior, or good-but-lacking-an-important element, as in I, Robot. It was horribly bad, start to finish. They were unable to make simple moral judgements. It seems the elephant should be the ruler, with the rider always scrambling and compensating.

I will be getting to Haidt's moral structures shortly, especially as he seemed to have listened to me for his revisions. (Or someone like me.)

For the Good of America

There has been a lot of commentary over the last few years - decades, really - about the problem with Muslims who are not violent or criminal in themselves, but still provide cover for and excuses for those who are dangerous extremists. I suspect there is a continuum, or more properly, a mix of motives.  Some are secret sympathisers only too happy to do their bit.  Others may be afraid of retribution against themselves or their families.  Most likely of all would be those who know that the extremists' level of violence and hatred are wrong, but excuse it as tit-for-tat of things done against the Muslim community.  Or, given the way that rhetoric runs, what they believe would happen to their community if they let their guard down for a moment.

I offer these guesses because we have seen this before in America.  Many times. How is this different from Italians covering for the Mafia, which was true within living memory and still has some residue?  In Boston and Chicago, organised crime was often Irish - Whitey Bulger was a veteran of the Killeen-Mullen war and ran free for many years, even though plenty of people knew where he was; in New York there was a strong Jewish and later Puerto Rican element to organised crime. The recent book Ghettoside by an LAPD detective describes how difficult it is to get witnesses to come forward in Hispanic and especially black communities because they are so fearful.

Colonists and Indians likely covered for their own.  It is the natural way of all tribes.

I see one difference, but I am not sure it is large in the long run. The other groups I mentioned were covering for criminals - guys trying to make an illegal buck - rather than people who wanted to change the government and social order. This would be similar to Basques or IRA, perhaps. Is it different?

Wyman Christmas Letter 2015 - Part VI (and last)

Hammerfest

Alert readers will remember that Chris lives above the Arctic Circle. He headed even farther north this year, giving nighttime tours showing the Northern Lights. Then beyond that. Seeking a hospital with a waiting list of less than a year for his minor surgery, he found that Hammerfest could get him in 7 months, so he drove up to the very top of Norway, twelve hours of secondary roads. The only things farther north are Svalbard and oil platforms. He will be back for Christmas for the first time in years, murmuring about moving back to the US soon.  Stay tuned.

The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt

I'm not going to do a review, but a series of shorter posts about topics covered. I was familiar with over half of this information, but it is nicely connected here, and my biggest takeaways were extensions of his earlier writings. First, it is not only that we often construct elaborate rationalisations for our moral beliefs, but that we don't mind too much if they aren't first class.  We are happy to settle for good-enough reasons, and don't seek better ones.  Even if we encounter better arguments, we tend not to pay much attention to them, so long as we can retain our good-enough ones. This is much of the reason why minds do not change. To take my recent gun control example, there are lots of folks in favor of added gun legislation who say "well, there is a lower homicide rate in European countries, where gun laws are stricter."  Attempts to show that this is so only in specialised cases, or that the low rate actually predates the legislation will be shrugged off.  The good-enough reason remains intact, they need look no further.

This not only those unreasonable other people, this is all of us.  Which is why we find each other infuriating.  A superior argument has a hard time even winning a hearing.  Not that we do not reason at all nor listen to each other.  In fact, once we have made up our minds about something it is usually almost impermeable to change from our own interior reasoning.  It is only significant disillusionment because of circumstances, or social persuasion by others.

It is not that reasoning does not affect us, but that it is limited to feedback from others, and tends to be gradual.  Haidt use the image of an elephant and rider.  The intuitive part of our moral reasoning, the elephant, is 90% of the picture.  The rational part, the rider, is but 10%. (He has some demonstration that this is a good thing and not to be despised.) The rider can steer events, and can ultimately direct where the elephant will go, but it is difficult and involves constant recalculation as the elephant does a whole lot of just-as-he-pleases.

I recognised one of my own major decisions in Haidt's context.  I retained doubts about whether believing Christianity was intellectually defensible when I first converted (or returned to the faith, depending on perspective). But I trusted that CS Lewis had encountered many more of the philosophical arguments than I had - having taken a First and become a philosophy professor in the early part of his career - and was far smarter and more familiar with the big issues in Western thought.  I took this as assurance that theism, and especially Christianity was at least not entirely in tatters and could be provisionally accepted.  You will note that this was merely a good-enough reason, not any airtight case. That sufficed for a long time.

Wyman Christmas Letter 2015 PartV

The Short Cut (Known to But a Few)

I (David) still tramp about in the local woods, and hope to do 5x more of it when I retire.  I have given up mapping the little-used trails (yes, I know there's an app for that) hoping that they embed in my brain instead.  So far, so good.  I nervously wonder about carrying a spray against bears and coydogs. Sometimes a son hikes with me, or granddaughters to pick wild berries.  Ben came out into the wild both times he was home.  Bowhunting season ends this week, so Chris can safely join me when I go back to "my" woods after three months. There is a joy in familiar trails, and a different joy in getting yourself safely out when you're not quite sure. Whenever I go seriously uphill I am still aware of the old damage from smoking, even years later.  If any of you come to visit, I have an extra walking stick.